


All Sparks Will Burn Out

by Merixcil



Series: Tumblr Fics [82]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, F/M, M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:07:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24107989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Not everyone finds their soulmate, and the people who do don't always like what they find
Relationships: Barbara Gordon/Dick Grayson, Joker (DCU)/Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne, Talia al Ghul/Bruce Wayne
Series: Tumblr Fics [82]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1759627
Comments: 10
Kudos: 60





	All Sparks Will Burn Out

“Feel it!”

Talia’s delight should be infectious. She’s trying so hard. Bruce has lost track of the hours he’s spent envisioning the path of least resistance, where he pretends that he does, that the fingers wrapped around his wrist spark like electricity, almost strong enough to stop his heart.

And people’s hearts have been known to stop. Falling in love is a major risk factor for most cardiac disorders, with some doctors recommending that we all swear off it altogether.

Bruce is standing on a third-floor balcony of a seedy hotel on the outskirts of Ras al-Khaimah and he’s been trying to make this work for far too long. His chest still seizes when he looks at Talia but his nerves are dull. He wants, oh how he wants. Memories of being twenty-something, curled up underneath Harvey Dent and waiting for the same thing hit him like a freight train. It takes time, the science says, and so he had given it time. Is still giving it years and years of himself.

It’s supposed to be mutual, it’s so rare that it’s not mutual. “Sorry.” His voice barely above a whisper.

Bruce watches Talia’s heart break over the course of the next two days, feebly begging him to feel what she does when her skin meets his. By the end of the week they’re on opposite sides of the world and he no longer knows if her promise to stay out of her father’s schemes means anything.

Selina laughs at Alfred’s suggestion that she’s going to be the one that flips the switch for Bruce. “I have enough of his attention already. Any more and he might try to make an honest woman of me, then who’s gonna rob the rich to feed the poor?”

“You keep everything for yourself.” Bruce chides.

She shrugs. “I’m kinda poor.”

They clash and come together and fall apart and spend the best part of a decade trying to work out if they like each other enough to make a go of it regardless. Not everyone finds their spark, and not everyone without a spark is unhappy.

Not everyone with a spark is happy. It’s a biological reaction, something to do with muscle cells vibrating at unique frequencies. Bruce has been meaning to set aside a weekend to take a thorough look into the science behind it.

“I still think we might…sometimes.” He tells her, still sweating from the chase.

Selina shrugs, out of breath. At ground level she looks exposed and vulnerable, nothing like the powerful, lithe thing that leaps across rooftops in the night. “Me too. But, ya know.”

Bruce nods. Soon they’ll be back above sea level and this whole conversation will be lost to the abyss.

But he still thinks about his third year with Dick as Robin, when they first met Barbara and she slipped away from them again and again until she didn’t. Bruce turned his back for five minutes, coming back to find the kids wrestling on the cave floor, the whole place wreaking like scorched ground after a thunderstorm.

Dick had been fractionally too young to really get it and Barbara was more than too sensible to do anything more than baulk at the whole thing. It’s supposed to take days, weeks, months to build up to the spark, but sometimes it’s instantaneous.

And mutual. And sometimes Bruce worries that he misremembered everything, that Talia felt like lightning and he was too stubborn to see it.

“Come on, Dick.” And Dick had come running back to him.

“What was that?”

Bruce had tried and failed to explain.

Bruce had been angry, jealous. He still is. Dick and Barbara still spark and keep on pretending that they don’t. Dick has run off with a beautiful alien girl who’s biology does accommodate the electricity boiling under humanity’s skin.

“It will happen for you, sir.” Alfred smiles.

Bruce raises and eyebrow. “Did it happen to you?”

“Never you mind, young man.”

The internet of all places is filled with people certain that they have been played by their own bodies. There is no one for them, there are no sparks. Some are sad and some are angry and half of them reject the notion that they should have to feel a spark and the rest are so determined to find theirs that they convince themselves they might just have it with every stranger on the street.

Bruce shakes hands with people who used to be his mother’s friends, with their children, with every corner of American high society. It doesn’t happen. It’s never instantaneous or mutual.

“Maybe we can just pretend it’s real.” Selina suggests, after showing up on the Manor doorstep, drunk as anything.

Bruce has Alfred call her a taxi home.

The only part of Bruce that’s visible in the Batsuit is his mouth. He doesn’t need to worry about whether The Riddler or Scarecrow are accidentally going to set off the electrical circuits under his skin because they never touch him there. The older he gets though, the more he worries that it’s going to be one of them, the costumed criminals who go out of their way to get his attention. He’s got more history with them that most of the people in the real world, after all.

He tries not to dwell in it. Bruce has seen Victor Fries driven mad with desperate longing for the spark he once felt with his wife. He’s seen Harley and Ivy decide to rest on their laurels once they discovered their shared spark.

The Joker always wears gloves. Presumably so he doesn’t leave any fingerprints in his wake, but it has the added benefit that for all the times he’s slapped Batman in the face, his and Bruce’s skin have never actually touched.

“Waddaya think? Should I go for it?” Joker titters. He’s got Batman tied down tight enough that it will take at least two minutes to wrench himself free. A strip of pale skin between the bottom of Joker’s glove and his rolled-up shirt sleeve hovers threateningly over Bruce’s mouth. It would be the work of a moment, and then they’d both know.

Probably. Bruce doesn’t know if he could handle that kind of certainty. “Joker!” He snaps, with no follow up beyond a feeble plea that the clown shut up. They’re in one of his more regular hideouts, the basement of a dockside warehouse, riddled with damp, and the only source of light in the room is the screen of an old smartphone.

Joker’s eyes shine bright in the gloom, his grotesque smile casting shadow over his deathly white face. The instant before the skin of his arm touches the skin of Bruce’s cheek, Bruce can see clear as day how this is going to go.

His heart won’t slow in the aftermath, and why should it? Blood thumping in his ears, reminding him that he’s alive and human and he would have been perfectly fine if he went his whole life not knowing.

“Well…” Joker starts.

Bruce has slipped his knots and knocked the clown unconscious before either of them can finish that thought.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the song Sparks by Editors
> 
> This was originally posted on my [tumblr](https://jeffersonhairpie.tumblr.com/). You can also find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/chadfuture_)
> 
> Comments are love!


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